Bill Gates 2
Bill Gates Bill Gates (See: http://wwstechnology.wikia.com/wiki/Bill_Gates) was born in Seattle on October 28, 1955. By age thirteen he was programming computers, and by age fifteen, he had developed a program with his friend Paul Allen, "Traf-o-Data," which calculated traffic by monitoring its patterns. The two boys made twenty thousand dollars from this, and decided that they would like to go into business together. In 1973, Gates entered Harvard, with the intention of studying law; however, he spe nt most of his time in the computer labs. Within two years, he and Paul Allen had founded a company together, Microsoft, and a year later, Gates had dropped out of Harvard, to devote all of his time to that company. The two young men were inspired and motivated by the idea that each home and each office could have a personal computer, and they wanted to see Microsoft develop the software to make this possible. Their first major achievement, was successfully developing BASIC software for the Altair computer; however, because of pirating, Microsoft had a hard time covering its overhead. Therefore, the company got off to a rough start. In 1980, IBM approached Microsoft, about developing software to run their new PC. Gates accepted the challenge gladly, and Microsoft succeeded. The company now had an operating system which could sell to countless computer companies, and by 1981, was making $16 million per year. Two years later Microsoft had offices around the world, and thirty percent of the world's computers were running on its software. When in 1984 VisiCorp announced the development of a mouse-driven computer with a graphic interface, Gates recognized the need to keep up with such innovations, and announced the Windows operating system. By 1986 Microsoft had gone public, and was worth $520 million dollars. Gates, at thirty one, was a millionaire. A year later, as stock prices rose, he bacame a billionaire, and has been one of the richest people in the world ever since (often the richest). In 1989, as competition began to arise from other operating systems, Gates decided to have Microsoft produce Microsoft Office, which was made to be only easily compatible with Windows. This demolished all threats of competition, from companies such as Apple (See: http://wwstechnology.wikia.com/wiki/Steve_Jobs) and gave Microsoft an essential monopoly in the operating systems market. In 2000, Gates retired from his position as CEO at Microsoft, and devoted more time to philanthropy and leadership, realizing that it was his obligation to give back to the world. Today, Bill Gates is one of the most influential people in the world, known for his wealth and for his great contributions to personal computing and software. He has had an incredible impact, through his life, on the direction that technology has taken, instituting innovations that are far ahead of their time. He, along with other young ingenious entrepreneurs (See: http://wwstechnology.wikia.com/wiki/Larry_Page_and_Sergey_Brin), has in some part dictated the path of our modern world. It is in large part because of this man, that almost all of us have personal computers; without his directing the electronic world in this direction, we could have waited much longer. Today, Bill Gates is still very active in Microsoft, which is still an extremely prominent company. In the future, one should expect this company to remain on the cusp of constant innovation, with Mr. Gates leading the way. External References: http://www.biography.com/articles/Bill-Gates-9307520?part=5 http://www.woopidoo.com/biography/bill-gates.htm http://www.thocp.net/biographies/gates_bill.htm